"The first truly successful Microsoft Windows operating system is twenty years old today; Windows 3.0 was launched on the 22nd of May 1990 and was the successor to Windows 2.1x. The Graphics User interface (technically it was not an operating system) sat on top of MS-DOS and could run applications for the operating system from within a Window and many might fondly remember that it was available on 5.25-inch high density floppy disks. More significantly, it proved to be the perfect partner for Intel's then-new range of 386 processor, which bought protected mode and extended memory capabilities to the market."

3.0 might have been the first version of Windows to actually be successful, but IMO it didn't get decent until 95. But then, since when does "success" ever correspond to "quality" in the first place? What's amazing is that it's been 20 years since the first commercially successful version of Windows, yet it took almost that long to get rid of most of the annoyances. And yet some stupid ones remain to this day.

3.0 might have been the first version of Windows to actually be successful, but IMO it didn't get decent until 95. But then, since when does "success" ever correspond to "quality" in the first place? What's amazing is that it's been 20 years since the first commercially successful version of Windows, yet it took almost that long to get rid of most of the annoyances. And yet some stupid ones remain to this day.

That's because each time you remove some old annoyances, there's someone to put some new ones. Maybe in order to motivate people to buy future updates ?

Eg : Win95 was somewhat stable and efficient. It could have remained light-weight. Then Microsoft integrated IE everywhere to justify its infamous presence, and it was the end. W2K had almost no built-in annoyances, it worked just perfectly well for most things. Then XP was made cartoonish, heavy as hell (including the task manager, which was just plain stupid), and full of stupid popups. And after getting somewhat usable finally, the Windows GUI was completely redone in Vista for no special reason, so that it becomes unreadable and unintuitive again...

No, I'm talking about long-standing annoyances. Like selecting the *entire* file name during rename, extension and all, leading to loads of "are you sure--Windows might not be able to read this file" messages. You'd think an OS that depends so much on filename extensions would get it right, but it's been there for as long as I remember. It wasn't until a dud of an OS release, Vista, before this was even fixed, and tons of $$$ worth of upgrades along the way (including forced hardware upgrades).

And how about deleting a file that's in use--does Windows 7 still bitch that it won't do anything and tell you to close the file and then try again manually, instead of just doing it once all handles are closed? Don't even get me started on all the annoyances caused by poor system design that has spawned a massive money-sucking industry, anti-virus.

That, and annoyances-by-design such as warning and notifying out the ass for everything, as well as the braindead idea of *hiding* filename extensions by default. But to be fair, these particular annoyances showed up starting with Windows ME if I remember right, they haven't been there from the start. And don't say that it's good to pop up useless notifications every ten seconds and in rapid-fire at boot just to "protect" people. Sure, these last couple haven't been there forever, but they sure as hell feel like it. I see Windows 7 has cleaned up the notification mess just a little bit, which is good--now there's gazillions of third-party apps that will continue the old MS way of "never shut the hell up."